Books I’d buy if I had a huge book buying budget.

I have been a student, and thus on a student budget, for most of my adult life. Consequently, when I receive my copy of GSAToday, I generally put the glossy bookstore flyer straight into the recycle bin without looking at it. As of last month I’m not just a student, I’m also a post-doc, with an income (though I’ll continue to count as a student, too, until the degree is actually awarded). While this income doesn’t yet translate to much in the way of spending money (having used up my savings to get here, and therefore needing more than usual from my first pay check to cover “moving in expenses”), it does mean that, for the first time, I actually looked at the flyer. This could be a mistake—were I to actually purchase everything which looks interesting, I could quickly use up all of that income I’m now making. Here is a short list of what was in the flyer which caught my eye this time, in the order listed in the flyer, and the member cost (US$) for each:

$42 The World in a Crucible: Laboratory Practice and Geological Theory at the Beginning of Geology

$34 Investigations into the Tectonics of the Tibetan Plateau

$56 When Did Plate Tectonics Begin on Planet Earth?

$63 Whence the Mountains? Inquiries into the Evolution of Orogenic Systems: A Volume in Honor of Raymond A. Price

$109 Tectonic Growth of a Collisional Continental Margin: Crustal Evolution of Southern Alaska

$67 Advances in High-Pressure Mineralogy

$49 Convergent Margin Terranes and Associated Regions: A Tribute to W.G. Ernst

$42 Earth and Mind: How Geologists Think and Learn about the Earth

$67 Tectonics, Climate and Landscape Evolution

$56 The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

$56 The Greenland Caledonides: Evolution of the Northeast Margin of Laurentia

$84 4-D Framework of Continental Crust

$70 Proterozoic Tectonic Evolution of the Grenville Orogen in North America

$ 42 Paleozoic and Mesozoic Tectonic Evolution of Central Asia: From Continental Assembly to Intracontinental Deformation

$70 Metamorphic Conditions along Convergent Plate Junctions

The above list got my total-I-could-spend-if-I-went-on-a-shopping-spree today to $907 (add 30% if I weren’t a GSA member). But then looking in their on-line store to create the above links revealed a few more I’d be interested in reading:

$40 Did Westward Subduction Cause Cretaceous–Tertiary Orogeny in the North American Cordillera?

$63 Backbone of the Americas: Shallow Subduction, Plateau Uplift, and Ridge and Terrane Collision

$42 The Origins of Geology in Italy

$28 Ultrahigh-pressure metamorphism: Deep Continental Subduction

$21 Collisional Delamination in New Guinea: The Geotectonics of Subducting Slab Breakoff

$42 Paleozoic and Mesozoic Tectonic Evolution of Central Asia: From Continental Assembly to Intracontinental Deformation

The full list comes to $1,131.00, or an average price of $53.86 for 21 books. I suppose it is for the best that I’m not actually shopping at this time—I’ve got so many papers I need to be reading at the moment that adding a pile of books that tall might make the list seem daunting. Perhaps in a month or so I’ll select just one from the list, and read it before I let myself purchase another…